Comparative Analysis of Gut Microbiota between Captive and Wild Long-Tailed Gorals for Ex Situ Conservation

The long-tailed goral is close to extinction, and ex situ conservation is essential to prevent this phenomenon. Studies on the gut microbiome of the long-tailed goral are important for understanding the ecology of this species. We amplified DNA from the 16S rRNA regions and compared the microbiomes of wild long-tailed gorals and two types of captive long-tailed gorals. Our findings revealed that the gut microbiome diversity of wild long-tailed gorals is greatly reduced when they are reared in captivity. A comparison of the two types of captive long-tailed gorals confirmed that animals with a more diverse diet exhibit greater gut microbiome diversity. Redundancy analysis confirmed that wild long-tailed gorals are distributed throughout the highlands, midlands, and lowlands. For the first time, it was revealed that the long-tailed goral are divided into three groups depending on the height of their habitat, and that the gut bacterial community changes significantly when long-tailed gorals are raised through ex situ conservation. This provides for the first time a perspective on the diversity of food plants associated with mountain height that will be available to long-tailed goral in the future.

Characterization of polymorphic microsatellite markers for the Japanese endangered land snail Mandarina

Objective

Mandarina is an endangered land snail genus of the oceanic Ogasawara archipelago. On Chichijima Island, the largest inhabited island in Ogasawara, this genus is almost extinct in the wild due to predation by invasive species. Although ex situ conservation programs started in 2010, genetic diversity and population structure remain unclear due to a lack of genetic markers with sufficient genetic variation. In this study, we designed polymorphic microsatellite markers of Mandarina to enable genetic analysis and to develop appropriate conservation plans.

Results

Twenty-three polymorphic microsatellite markers were identified from the genomic DNA of wild samples of Mandarina mandarina. We assessed the genetic diversity of each marker. In 16 markers, neither linkage disequilibrium nor deviation from Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium was detected. These 16 markers were tested for multiplex PCR using low-density DNA extracted non-lethally from captive samples of M. mandarina, M. chichijimana and M. suenoae. Of the 16 markers, 15, 12 and 9 were usable for multiplex PCR, respectively. Genetic analysis using these microsatellite loci will be an important resource for the conservation of Mandarina.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13104-022-06147-4.